Ghost Rider scares me into insomnia

It's nearly 3:52 in the morning and due to my dutifully inept sleep schedule, which I've long since given up on, I'm writing a blog. I've been deeply disturbed by something I've heard tonight. It started when I was messaging with a friend of mine about a very sensitive subject on aim. It seems aim has gone the way of the dinosaurs in the sense that a select group of trendy beatniks still find them appealing but the height of their popularity died at the turn of the century. The subject of this rousing conversation was taste, something which I like to talk about on a daily basis as a means to come to grips with it and try and determine if everything is subjective or not.


My friend who I was speaking with loves Marvel comics. I'm fairly unphased by them personally and I no longer read them; and the time in which I did hassle myself reading them was brief. I find the stories of the heroes cumbersome and once you know the origin you can get the same value reading the current history of the characters in a wiki entry as you can buying a comic book. Batman always feels fresh to me as long as they don't weigh him down with that sci fi Justice League stuff but that's an aside. Marvel comics are dead to me, other than a couple movies which I happen to enjoy and a wonderful silver age period of comic books inspired by Stan Lee.


Anyways, my friend, who loves everything about life God bless him, said that he was hoping for a sequel to Ghost Rider. I jokingly agreed. Who the hell WOULDN'T want a sequel to Ghost Rider? It would be an event for the whole goddamn family to have a night about town in style. Have a Ghost Rider party and get destroyed before even setting foot in the theater. I nearly walked out of the first one because I was unable to find humor in it upon initial viewing, but a new Ghost Rider would be a splendid outing and a breeding ground online for viral humor. But then my friend wrote back...he was serious. He really wanted a Ghost Rider movie for Ghost Rider to be portrayed as he was in the comic books he is a huge fan of. A true to form Ghost Rider film? God only knows what happens in the pages of a Ghost Rider comic when he's not being weighed down by Nicholas Cage and the confines of a Marvel studio budget (no one correct me on who made the movie. I don't care). So yeah a true to form Ghost Rider film would be just as stupendously bad and over the top as the first movie. It can't be done. I'll over draft my bank account and finance the movie myself for the first person who shows me a script for a movie entitled Ghost Rider that's not a laughable piece of shit. By concept, it's not possible.


Then I began to think about the weight of my friend's desires. He was a "huge fan" of Ghost Rider. How can ANYONE be a huge fan of Ghost Rider? What sort of fucked up annals of America do you have to come from to grow up reading the cigarette-burnt pages of the same stack of Ghost Rider comics over and over and grow up thinking he's some great hero of the ages? NO one loves Ghost Rider. I thought the Marvel continuity only kept him around for the novelty value, like a weird seasonal item. But no...apparently there's sick cult of degenerates, that actually LOVE a flaming skeleton seated atop a motorcycle fighting crime. It's a visual assualt. Utterly ridiculous...and yet people can find something just and appealing in it. In my refusal to believe it I found this:

http://community.livejournal.com/ghostriderfans

Yes. There is a live journal and a blog for the sick crazy people who believe Ghost Rider is capable of supporting some kind of fan base. By all outward appearances they probably appear to be normal people. They probably are literate hominids who hold a 9-5 job in a cubicle and drive a Volvo and then come home and eat dinner and after dinner what do they do? They read comics about a skeleton that rides a motorcycle. With true vested interest too. Then they go so far as to blog about it. Dear god what is this world coming to. In some sickly ironic trap, I too am presently blogging about Ghost Rider, rambling far beyond the point of anyone's attention span. I can see how it becomes some sadist's fascination. What makes Ghost Rider tick? What drives publishers to keep him circulated in the dustier corners of comic shops for the past 20 years or so? Does it feel hot in here? I need some Gatorade.